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SAP's Bill McDermott: "It Doesn't Take Two Years to Create a Good Strategy"

What is our higher purpose? What do we really stand for? If we weren’t around would it matter? These philosophical questions were recently posed by SAP Co-CEO Bill McDermott to an impressive crowd of customers at SAP’s second annual Environment, Health and Safety Management conference. “Our purpose is to run better,” said McDermott. “Around 65-70 percent of the world’s transactions are run on SAP. That is a heavy load and we need to continue to do a good job.”

When McDermott and co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe first came together to hatch SAP’s new way forward in early 2010, it didn’t take the duo long to see where things were headed and how SAP could extend beyond its Business-to-Business roots and into the burgeoning Business-to-Consumer realm. But for SAP to make this “inter-dependency” between business and consumer successful, interactions had to be highly consumable and user friendly. “Helping shea nut farmers in Ghana compete, for instance”, said McDermott. “It doesn’t take two years to create a good strategy. We apply human instincts around things we can measure and take a bet.”

That bet is a pretty big one, involving three megatrends Snabe and McDermott uncovered in just two weeks.

Big Data – With data doubling every 18 months, maybe every 12 months, companies have too much data and have difficulty cutting through it all to see what matters. “That’s why we invented SAP HANA. It is absolutely changing the world and is the fastest growing product at SAP.”

Mobility – By 2014-2016, there will be 6.4 billion mobile app users. With the world population at about 7 billion, it’s not hard to see that basically everyone will own a mobile device or smart phone. “It’s an unstoppable force so we took it upon ourselves to buy Sybase,” said McDermott. “We saw how beautiful our applications are on the iPad. The consumable nature of the technology is undeniable.” Sybase also specializes in managing unsecured devices, processing 2 billion SMS and MMS messages a day in a secure environment.

CloudComputing – Many SAP customers are running SAP in private clouds, some public, while others take a hybrid approach. McDermott estimates there will soon be 1,000 SAP Business ByDesign customers, thus validating SAP’s commitment to cloud and the flexibility it offers. “We are listening and we have our eyes wide open. SAP wants to hammer down your business as a best run business. Our ecosystem will be open with no desire to lock people into long, ridiculous contracts.”

McDermott also hit upon SAP’s involvement in the U.S. Federal Government’s Recovery, Accountability and Transparency Board, which, despite the divided nature of government and strong financial headwinds, is doing quite well. “Everyone wants to know where the stimulus money went,” said McDermott. “We developed a cloud solution in a short timeframe. We can now see where money went at the state level and whether jobs were created. What you learn is unbelievable.”

McDermott was surprised to learn there was 30 percent unemployment in the construction industry because workers simply didn’t know where the jobs were. “IT needs to link where the opportunities are and with the solution we developed, you can now log on to iPhone or iPad and see where the work is.”

In closing, McDermott praised the work of SAP customers Baker Hughes and Kimberly-Clark for similar efforts of using IT to create opportunities and get in front of environmental, health and safety issues before they happen.

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This is very informative Tim. Sure, Mr. McDermott’s vision on SAP HANA and Mobility initiatives has created a huge impact in the ERP strategies on large enterprises today. It would be interesting to find out what the upcoming SAPPHIRENOW at Madrid has to offer for the SAP users. After the very dynamic Orlando SAPPHIRENOW in May, I hope to find lot more pointers to the future of Mobility and SAP HANA and Analytics from Madrid in November. Regards, Bappaditya http://www.infosysblogs.com/sap/

Bappaditya, thanks for your great comments. SAPPHIRENOW from Madrid is shaping up to be a stellar event as there will be plenty of information shared about mobility, SAP HANA and analytics. If you are unable to attend in person, there where will be virtual broadcasts and plenty of blogs (from yours truly and others) taking place on the SAP SAPPHIRE NOW newsroom: http://events.news-sap.com/